Since ancient times, Jews have lived in what is now Bulgaria, and historical records suggest there was a thriving community of Byzantine Jews there in the Middle Ages. Ashkenazi Jews didn’t settle in the country until the 13th century; at the end the 15th, the Sephardim who eventually came to predominate began to arrive. Yet no archaeological remains of medieval Bulgarian Jewy have been found—that is, until Mirko Robov began excavating what he had assumed to be a church. Amanda Borschel-Dan writes:

The [supposed] Jewish house of worship was discovered on the outskirts of a medieval fortress complex located on Trapezitsa Hill [in the medieval capital of Tarnovgrad]. It is a large building that was built during the 1240s and survived until the fall of Tarnovgrad during the Ottoman conquest in 1393, when the town was completely razed. . . .

Bulgaria boasts a 2,000-year-old Jewish community, members of which have been documented to have lived in a Jewish quarter on the Trapezitsa Hill during the Middle Ages. If confirmed as a synagogue after further research, this would be the only one from Bulgaria during this era, and one of only a handful that have been discovered throughout the continent.

“This new-found building is not a church, because it’s characterized by different planning and construction,” said Robov. “It’s coated from the inside, but there are no wall paintings. This is why I connect the building with the religious practices of a different ethnic group.” Robov explained that all of the place names that are connected with the city’s medieval Jewish population are found in areas on or around Trapezitsa Hill. These include a Jewish quarter, a Jewish graveyard at the northwestern foot of the hill, and an area on the southwestern foot called Chifutluk.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.